Apocalypse, Kind-Of 16 comments

By Caroline Langston

There’s a theme building here on Good Letters, the Image blog,: as much as our daily bloggers seek to get their minds around specific movies, books, and television shows, they also are meditating on that classic question of how to live the good life in these crazy times. Laura Bramon Good’s posts on the cubicle life and Ann Conway’s reflections on nature and New England immediately come to mind, but all the posts recognize that the spiritual pursuit of life itself is an aesthetic act.

Last time I talked about the current mania for the organic as part of a quest for purity. Laura Bramon Good’s subsequent post interpreted the eco-friendly fad as being as much about fashion and style as anything else.

Now, brothers and sisters, maybe it is time to consider the simple, low-carbon-footprint life as being a function of no other option. Last Wednesday night, as a huge storm system swept across the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, scattering tornadoes in its wake and strewing green leaves like confetti in the streets, the electricity in my house flickered once and then went off.

It stayed off for the next 36 hours.

Our 86-year-old next door neighbor had called the power company to hear a recording that the repair might take another 72. Staffing cutbacks? The fact that gas in my neighborhood is something like $4.25 a gallon? Overhead power lines? NPR has been running an interesting series on the nation’s aging infrastructure. (Disclosure: I used to work there.)

Given that we live in the so-called Capital of the Free World, if a real disaster occurs—hmm, like another terrorist attack, maybe?—this city is in deep, deep trouble.

Admittedly, our family could have been a bit more prepared. We did have flashlights, thank God, mainly because my husband is an audio engineer and needs them for climbing around amplifiers and microphones. But we had no TV, and no radio. My cell phone was dead—it was lost in the house, too—and our other phones were cordless, and therefore inoperable.

About an hour after the power went off, my husband and I sat in bed, surrounded by blank-faced digital clocks, trying to set some kind of alarm that would rouse him for his usual 2:45 a.m. wake-up time. We settled on a combination of the one analog clock in the house with the alarm on his cell phone, then drifted off to dreams about overslept alarms and clocks flashing “12:00” over and over again.

All night in my fever-dreams I kept thinking of the biblical parable of the Foolish Virgins who had not thought to conserve enough oil in their lamps, who are summarily shut out of the kingdom, while the Wise Virgins—who prissily refused to share—proceed on ahead. I made a mental note to get ahold of our former Mormon neighbors who had moved away to get a copy of the LDS’s exhaustive list of supplies for disasters.

I awoke in a house with a grouchy preschooler and a hot, shedding foster dog to no radio, no computer (which meant no work, basically), and worst of all, no coffee. Fortunately, we have a gas stove. (Take that as a lesson, you remodelers.) I pulled out a pack of kitchen matches and struck one, smelling that distinct sulfur flash that always reminds me of my mother, and put on a pot of water for tea.

In literature, these kinds of occurrences always turn out to be opportunities for self-renewal. Walker Percy said—and I’m mangling the quotation since I cannot find the book—that “a man would rather live through a hurricane than through an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.” (Can somebody post the whole thing below?) Disasters purportedly are when babies are conceived, lives reconsidered, the social order stabilized.

Early indications were that this was not going to be the case for my family. My initial reaction was as a classic representative of what Percy, in his futuristic Love in the Ruins, called “the old Auto Age.” (Which, given that the novel was published in 1971, seems pretty prescient now in these days when Peak Oil no longer seems a figment of the Deep Ecologists’ imagination.)

Rather than embracing an opportunity for unplugged quiet, I took my son to pick up breakfast at the 7-11 and dropped him off at school. Then I went to that temple of commerce, Target, and wandered down the aisles, enjoying the blast of high-volume air conditioning and considering supplies (made in China) that I might purchase in order to be prepared for potential future disasters. I ended up with some batteries and a black dial phone....

Domestic harmony was frayed. Since we kept expecting the power to come back on at any minute, I didn’t think to ice down the meat in the freezer until it was too late. I asked my husband if we could go spend the night at a hotel, preferably the Ritz (“This is how come God made credit cards, honey, for times like these!”).

To which he responded, with the authoritative tone of our unexpectedly traditional-ish marriage, “No. It’s a waste of money.” We quarreled, then decamped for the neighborhood pool where we glared at each other over the chlorine and our son, cool now, splashed with abandon. Then we went to a working-class Italian restaurant frequented by cops, and made up over a beer and parmagiana.

I thought about it some more, and fell into recollection again: my husband’s reaction was just what my long-dead father’s would have been—my father, a man born in 1916 who could fix cars and repair electrical wiring and who would have been ready for 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or anything else. “He’s right,” my brother John—another father figure to me—echoed in an email once the crisis was over: “It is good to rough it a little bit.”

So here I sit, thinking about how to be one of those Wise Virgins the next time, and the kind of daughter that would honor my father’s memory.